So there I was – gasp – cleaning. Sorting through some books, really, and I stumble across The Irresistible Offer by Mark Joyner. Apparently, I bought it some three or four years back, and never got around to reading it. I’ve been thumbing through it this past week with mixed feelings. I’m about half way through, so I reserve judgment, but as it stands, it’s been a little more light weight than I had hoped. It harkens back to the sales books of the 90’s, where it was all about the how and less the why. With that said, it makes some valuable points.
The basic premise is that businesses need to make an irresistible offer – a deep touchstone that is so powerful that customers can’t refuse it. Now that’s something interesting, because what you always hear about is the brand and the USP (unique selling proposition). It’s part and parcel to the entire sales and marketing process. I think it’s fair to say we all know what what a brand is. I talk ad nauseam about it, and I’ll no doubt continue to do so. I love good branding.
But what about the idea of making an offer irresistible? And what is the difference? In short, it’s an offer that is so immediate and powerful that people are compelled to buy from you. Joyner frequently cites Domino’s Pizza’s classic 30-minutes or less campaign. Implicit is a value statement of speed and a confidence-inspiring guarantee. Or think of FedEx – when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight. The statements are not simply unique selling propositions. They contain value statements, and they make an offer. Pizza, fast. Delivery, overnight. And, more importantly, they are easily digestible almost intuitively. There’s no thought or processing involved. They are actions that make statements. Or, maybe truer yet, they are statements that produce actions.
Now, I think this is really interesting. Usually, when you put your marketing hat on, you spend a lot of time thinking about what you’re about. Who you are. What you stand for. Then you put your sales hat on, and you think about the entire process. What you say, what you show, how you show it. But there’s a really good point, here. That an essential part of getting people to act is offering something beyond just what you are, and that you don’t need to go into a whole sales pitch to do it. In a sense, the irresistible offer merges sales and brand into one compact statement. Urban photography, for example, might be a brand, but it’s not an offer. Free photography would be an offer and not a brand. Urban photography for free would be both.
If you think about it, in some ways, this treads on similar ground to what Seth Godin more recently addressed in Free Prize Inside, his follow-up to The Purple Cow. The idea that you need to offer something of distinction to grab people’s attention and stand out. It’s not just a brand – it’s the thing that grabs you and sucks you in. That forces you to say “I can’t believe they did that!”
So here’s the question on my mind at the moment. We all know our brands. We all know our sales. What can we do to merge both into one?
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Las Vegas, Nevada is on of the epi-centers of the services sector of the economy. Wal-Mart Service sector jobs are protested by out of work service sector employees paid for by yes, a service sector union. There is delicious irony in the video. The not so delicious irony is that a doen't have the economic base to support itself. The result is a pitiful melange of low wage and low/no benefit antagonists trying to force higher economic outcomes without the rest of the economy providing the wealth to make it really possible.